Reagan Ross Published in Fast Capitalism

An essay by Marylhurst faculty member Reagan Ross on the film American Psycho was published in the academic journal Fast Capitalism.

In Inside Doesn’t Matter: Consumerism’s Serial Annihilation of Women and the Self in American Psycho, Reagan Ross writes:

Perhaps no film more radically reveals the “serial killer” (cannibalistic) nature of consumerism than American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron). The implications of this disturbing “reality” are cataclysmically far reaching: The end of the world may not come from some tangible material catastrophe (at least insofar as it isn’t a corollary of this dehumanization process); rather, more insidiously, it may come via a psychological de-humanization process whereby we literally lose our humanity from the inside out. To understand this development, the film didactically reveals an all-consuming consumption fixation that begins with a food fetish but then is extended to the consumption of women in particular, Others in general, and, most disturbingly – and informing the first two – the “self.”

Fast Capitalism is an academic journal with a political intent. The journal publishes reviewed scholarship and essays about the impact of rapid information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century.

Reagan Ross teaches in the B.A. in Culture & Media Studies program at Marylhurst University. His areas of expertise are film and media studies, critical theory, political criticism, post-Marxism, utopian/dystopian studies, women’s studies and masculinity studies.